More from the "why bipartisanship can't work" guy

Yesterday I quoted someone who has worked in and observed national politics for many years, about why this era's partisan impasse really is different from what we've known in other eras -- and worse. In short, his point was that today's GOP minority was acting like a parliamentary opposition -- voting absolutely as a bloc, under the threat of party discipline -- in our non-parliamentary system, which made it very hard to get anything done.

He is back with another installment, after surveying the range of internet response to his views:

"I'm surprised at the number of people who say, in
effect, 'But lots of bills have passed with Republican votes this year.'

"That's the reason to keep including (as your blog
post
did) the word "major" in front of "legislation."
In a parliamentary system, the party does not make EVERY vote into one
of
required lock-step voting - only major votes. Hence the notion of
the "three line whip" notice in the House of Commons - defy that,
and you're dead. But absent the three lines drawn on the whip
notice, an MP can vote the way he or she prefers. Or at least that was
the way it used to work. Probably it is all done by Blackberry messages
now.

"What the GOP has got going is a three-line whip
notice on
major legislation. The Recovery Act passed the House without a single
GOP
vote - not even one! That could not happen without party discipline
coming from the party, not spontaneously from each House member of the
party. It is true that there are lots of other bills that Republicans
can
vote for if they wish. True, but irrelevant. If any of the bills
really matters to Obama in a big way, the contemporary GOP version of
the three-line
whip notice comes into play.

"(And how EXACTLY does each GOP member get
the word that a particular vote really matters for this purpose? Find
the
answer to that, and you will have the perfect comeback to those who try
to
blame intransigence of the Dems for the lack of GOP votes. Someone
somewhere is giving orders to GOP members, whether by verbal means,
written or
oral, or secret handshakes or numbers of lanterns hung in the steeples
of churches.)

"A closely related development fascinates and
infuriates me,
partly re the GOP and partly re the press. In the Senate, the GOP votes
against cloture. But when the Dems finally manage to get the 60 votes,
lots of GOP senators typically vote for the bill on final passage.
"What's
up with THAT?" I've asked several times. In the past, if you
opposed a bill getting to a vote on the floor, typically (admittedly not
always) you would also oppose it IN the vote on the floor. That was the
only reason to oppose it getting to the floor - because you opposed
it! The answer, I've been told several times (by Democratic
staffers, who don't seem at all surprised or perturbed), is that a lot
of
Republicans don't want to be on record as voting against a bill they
believe the public or their constituents favor. Huh? Trying to kill
it without a vote is somehow safe politically, but voting against it on
final
passage is not? Now that, I submit, is an anomaly the blame for which
we
can lay at the feet of the much-diminished news media, and the
shortcomings of
the Senate Democrats."

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His recent books Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009) are based on his writings for The Atlantic. His latest book is China Airborne. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

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